Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, companies utilizing e-commerce websites often do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought-after products. Instead, a customer navigating an e-commerce website typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs. Even a customer with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes experiences difficulty in locating a desired product from among hundreds or thousands of offered products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating.
In response to these difficulties, these companies continually strive to make their e-commerce websites more dynamic, compelling, and easier for users to navigate and locate products. To help meet these goals, one recent innovation allows customers to search for a product by tags associated with that product. Tags essentially enable customers, the e-commerce company, or some other entity the ability to easily categorize products. For instance, a customer who has purchased a certain fitness-related book may tag this book as relating to “fitness”. When other customers then conduct a future tag search based on “fitness”, this book will appear in a returned listing of products.
Unfortunately, products returned to customers in response to tag searches might be presented or listed in a haphazard fashion. That is, if a customer searches for products associated with a tag entitled “fitness”, a most desirable product may appear near the end of the returned list, while a less desirable product may appear nearer the beginning of the list. Therefore, while the tag search effectively narrows the number of products for the customer to peruse, a tag search might not allow for efficient inspection of the returned list of products.
Accordingly, among other potential improvements, there remains a need for improving navigation of e-commerce websites and the ability for users to locate desired products.